The Sacred and the Profane

[Latimer]

My paternal grandfather inherited a number of 19th century American paintings: minor Hudson River School, Luminism and California Plein Air along with some Arts & Crafts pottery, none of which was to his or my grandmother's taste, and which had no sentimental value to them. They sold it all--figuring it better that others enjoy what they didn't--and in the late-fifties through mid-seventies used the proceeds to add to their opposite collection, which came to include Josef Albers prints, Ruth Asawa string sculptures, works by the Southern California cool crowd such as Billy Al Bengston and Ed Ruscha, Elsworth Kelly, and three of Warhol's Black Marilyns. They didn't have huge amounts of money and didn't buy for investment: they bought what they liked and what they liked was what was fashionable at the time. Nor were they particularly prescient: as luck would have it, what was fashionable then remains so now, but they never imagined that a few works would increase astronomically in value over the years. When my grandmother died about ten years ago without leaving any of the works to a particular heir, none of them had the resources to buy out the other heirs to obtain the "major" pieces. Sentimentality or family legacy had nothing to do with it. And as my father observed wryly at the time, while it was impossible for him to feel sentimental about an Andy Warhol silkscreen or an Elsworth Kelly panel, he would have felt sentimental about the Hudson River School, Luminism and California Plein Air works that his parents sold decades ago. As would I! He did keep the Joseph Albers prints--"Homage to the Square", the least valuable works in the collection. I'm a big Albers fan, and I've asked him to leave them to me.